Dredd. Karl Urban absolutely nailed that role, and all without ever showing the top half of his face.
Sadly Dredd didn't make enough money to recoup their production costs, while it was in theaters. It's been estimated that Dredd made around $20 million in the Home Market. This means how many DVD and Blu-ray sales they made. I wasn't able to find any info on streaming numbers unfortunately.
I still hold out hope that a sequel is made and released before the end of the decade.
If Dredd is the movie I'm thinking of, I would assume VHS sales outpaced both Bluray and dvd sales combined! Didn't that movie come out in 1995?
It's probably because I was drunk when I watched Judge Dredd in the theater, but I seem to remember liking Stallone in that. I thought that Dredd was just a worse rip-off of The Raid, but then I read somewhere that they basically co-evolved to a similar thing.
Judge Dread was a fine movie for people who are into that sort of movie (and I am) but it was a pretty terrible adaptation of the comics.
As a Stallone movie it's entertaining in a "brain off eat popcorn" way, same sorta feel as Demolition Man (which was fun). It's only once you understand the material that it's supposed to be adapting that you feel like you were cheated.
That makes sense. I enjoyed the first Tom Cruz Reacher movie. Then I read a handful of the books, and was just very disappointed in the casting.
It also depends on your ability to not leave when Rob Schneider shows up and starts Rob Schneidering all over the damn screen.
I might be in the minority but Chappie was a really good movie. It’s a real bummer Die Antword were so horrible to work with that the director kinda gave up on it.
I never understood why they thought it would be a good idea to have them in it. It's not like they are known well enough to have a huge pull
I actually watched the movie because of them.
Stumbled upon the band on youtube, and I'd never heard anything like it before.
Plus, their music videos are fucking sick!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcXNPI-IPPM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXlZfc1TrD0
I used to love them until the stories of them being fucking horrible people came out. They've been accused of rape, human trafficking and slavery.
I saw Chappie for the first time last week and was moderately devastated to find out there isn't going to be sequels. It had so much style, humor and personality!
Yeah, but before the director made several more movies that were all bad. I don't know how he keeps getting work.
Yeah, that's another that makes no sense to me. People largely dislike all his recent works. "Let's give him a huge budget for a two part star wars fan fic!"
Snyder has an amazing eye for action. Sucker Punch, 300, and Watchmen were all amazing visual/auditory feasts. Everything else about his movies is just average to below average, though.
Giving him a Star Wars makes perfect sense when you consider what Disney thinks of the Star Wars audience. "Just give them laser sword and space ships and explosions and they'll be happy."
Blomkamp is better in every way. I think he got blacklisted because the money guys didn't like his social commentary.
Blokamp is great at effects and story ideas, he's not a good director. Even District 9 is a bit of a directorial mess but there's enough interesting story there to overcome that. The rest of his films? Not so much.
I personally wouldn't put him above Snyder in the visuals category, but I respect your opinion and I don't think you're way off or anything. I can see having that preference.
I mean, stupid teenage boys will spend what money they have to hang out with their friends... So, it's a viable audience.
His stuff at least manages to make money somehow, so that makes some kind of sense from a money worship point of view. I doubt Blomkamp's movies raked in as much cash though.
............uhhhhhhh, I would ask your mom if she smoked while pregnant with you. There's clearly something wrong with the development of how your brain came out.
Look, I'm not saying any of them come close to the original, but imo it's the second best of the series (including all the dogshit jurassic worlds) because it sticks to what made the first one great; small amount of people trapped on an island with dinos. The Lost World was like half that but then it turns in to some weird almost king kong-esq thing. Also i love me some Goldblum but he's better as a foil imo and Chris Pratt has nowhere near the gravitas as Sam Neil. Like really besides the annoying parents what do you not like about the third one?
It became a parody of Godzilla movies for no real reason. And it came out of nowhere. I call it the movies 4th act.
Jurassic World is a guilty pleasure of mine.
It's good enough to grip you and at the same time so predictable and full of clichés it's also funny.
Plus, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are both hot as hell.
I did not.
::: spoiler spoiler The matrix, jurrasic park, and promised Neverland all got sequels that most people think are shit. :::
I really don't get the hate for the second two.
There was a bit more to the story and required paying attention. The second two had more action that's wasn't directly related to the story but was still good.
As much as I tried to like 4 it was crap.
What's up with denying the trilogy? The shitty PC era movie I get it. But the sequels were excellent, the symbolism and how smith is defeated it's brilliant. I bet you wanted a copy of the first movie.
The thing is that "excellent" is something they are not... Look I enjoyed the movies too, they can be quite fun. Some aspects are great, the action and stunt work is in my opinion flawless for the time. Some other things were great too and some others not so much. But in general, really they are not good movies if we try to be a bit neutral, and at the very least they can't follow the complexity of the theme from the first movie while making it look so simple like that one did. It may just be the case of standing too close to the sun, the movies as part of the trilogy just can't compare. So people have a feeling of rejection to them. And probably the one thing people find it tough to come to grips with is the fact that the first movie had great action, that helped the movie go forward, while the others just seem to have random action scenes that are just not part of the story. It's just about how they are added into the story.
But don't let that bother you, enjoy the movies, I still do, they are just not the masterpieces the first one was.
And no, its not about wanting the first one again, in essence, I wish the movies would have managed to expand the story in a refreshing way like the Animatrix did. But they just fall flat instead, simple mindless fun that kinda finish the storyline quite OK for me.
Now the fourth part... That was brilliant, a brilliant crap, but brilliant nonetheless. If my guess is not wrong, it was a great middle finger to the movie execs that wanted to squeeze more money out of the movies.
You call it a trilogy because you reject the fourth one
I call it trilogy because I reject the first one
We are not the same
Jokes aside, I would call 2&3 a long movie, which makes it a trilogy again. One mistake is to see them as separate
And I was going to say "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", but apparenly a sequel for that is coming out too.
More streetcar conspiracy, please! A half-cartoon about good urbanism isn't the movie we deserve, but it's the movie we need.
Writing duo Samit and Hernandez are best known for their work as screenwriters for “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” “Pokemon Detective Pikachu,” “Addams Family 2,” and the upcoming Disney+/Lucasfilm special “Lego Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy.”
Hooooo boy.
There was a script for one but Alan Rickman passed away (😭😭😭) and it got shelved. There are always rumors circling about still but nothing concrete.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It did quite well when it came out, and it felt like there was potential for sequels
I'm surprised nobody has done a modern TV version. All five books have been successfully adapted for radio, the scripts are done, it's already blocked out into well-paced individual episodes. It's just sitting there waiting to be made. You just need a good cast and a show runner who isn't going to monkey with the source material. It's already proven to be popular and long-lived. Seems like a no-brainer.
All five books have been successfully adapted for radio
As far as I’m aware, the first two radio series predate the books. So, in fact, they were successfully adapted into print.
show runner who isn’t going to monkey with the source material
When's the last time THAT happened?
Which I didn't like at all, it felt too much like an audiobook to me, reading all the guide bits, not like an adaptation. Looks like you can never satisfy all fans at once.
I blame Douglas Adams' extended tax evasion scheme. I think they were already struggling to finish the first one.
Ohh that’s a good one. The other books afterwards were great too.
Would’ve loved a sequel and would honestly not mind them artistically fudging it a bit to pick back up with an older Arthur Dent
And the book wasn't living up to the original radio series
Mostly kidding on that
I agree that I like the book better, initially I disliked the movie, but I've come around on it, some things from the radio series were changed for the book, and so it just kind of feels right they'd further change things for the movie. Playing a little fast and loose with it feels very in the Douglass Adams spirit to me.
I believe Adams himself considered each different medium to be "it's own story" though just as he added and changed things from the radio play for the book, he also added and changed things in the movie screen play... When he was involved in it. I'm not going to pretend it was all his work but it was it's own thing.
Douglas Adams writing doesn't translate well to film I think, a bit like Pratchett's. It can be done (Good Omens was a great adaptation of Pratchett) but it's probably super hard to do well and keep the original feeling/spirit
The 1981 TV series did a fine job, likely in no small part thanks to having Adams himself around and involved.
I feel like any future HHG adaptation would need to be TV rather than theatrical film. That universe is just too full to condense meaningfully into a 90-minute blockbuster meant to keep the Hollywood lowest common denominator in their seats. You need room for all the multilayered apparently-random stuff interacting with each other in the particularly bizarre ways Adams was so good at pulling off, and it needs to capture the whimsy of the source material without devolving into the unremarkable formulaic stuff the latest attempt to do Dirk Gently on TV turned out to be.
Master and Commander. It was such a great adaptation of a hugely popular series, I expected it to do better at the box office than it did.
I would have loved a sequel, too. That movie would probably have done better if it had not have to compete to The Return of the King that year.
It was a great try, visually stunning and true to the overall feel of the book, but it didn't have a very cohesive story. They tried to cover too much ground. It would have been better if they had just stuck to the first book.
Yeah, would have been nice to find out what happened after Neo flew away. At least Rage was playing.
But seriously: it was a perfect ending. Now he's Superman, kicks everyone's ass, frees mankind. The sequels were not only shit but completely unnecessary.
"Great" is a massive overstatement. They were passable movies that suffered from bad pacing and exposition dumping. I don't hate reloaded or revolutions, but I'm not going to go out of my way to watch them like I do for the first one.
Matrix sequels underrated crew rise up!
Say what you will about the Wachowskis, they never fail to push boundaries and try something weird and interesting with every film.
I'm very glad that the people who don't appreciate that haven't stopped them from doing what they do. What a bunch of wet blankets.
The biggest problem with those two movies is that the pacing was awful. You had exhausting fight and chase scenes followed by scenes that had way too much mumbo jumbo dialogue. Every scene could have been made shorter without losing any plot points.
Is only mumbo jumbo if you don't understand them. I got them just fine. And the action scenes were groundbreaking, nobody else tried something like that before in Hollywood movies, it was a delight to see
I understood them all just fine... Still poor pacing. The first movie was basically half buildup for the second half's continuous action. Two and three both suffered from the abrupt slow down after the action scenes that I personally feel never really got "better."
I mean, I've got them all so I'm not going to pretend they're as bad as other movies that we pretend didn't get sequels but they just worse than the first one.
That said, I would regularly rewatch a cut that was just all the action scenes.
Warcraft
Like the video game. It was actually a pretty good introduction to the lore, (which I only know surface level from playing the games and not digging real deep. So there may have been mistakes) and it was just about to get good, but, there just wasn't enough interest to sink more money in the franchise.
I saw Warcraft in theaters when it came out. I left the theater thinking that it was 6/10 at best.
Fast forward to 2021. I Saw that it had gotten better reviews since years ago, and I was thirsty for some nostalgia and was willing to give it another try. Turns out, I liked it more this time around. I believe that I had my expectations really high when I went to see it. Seconded watch, I gave it a 7.5/10.
I really liked how neither the Orcs or Humans were the bad guys. They painted both teams as equally sympathetic.
When we were following the Humans I was like "Yeah! Let's crush those Orcs!" But then we start following the Orcs and I'm like "Watch out! Those asshole Humans are coming for you!"
I recently watched this and was surprised how much I enjoyed it, I expected it to be terrible based on the reviews.
I find this comment reassuring as I have said movie on my watchlist.
(My Warcraft knowledge is about almost finishing Warcraft III, for some reason I always leave it close at the end, or at least I think I am close.)
I think going back to warcraft 1 was ultimately a mistake. If they did a part closer to where the wow story was it would have done better.
I thought the exact same thing after I watched it. Sadly, that same thought made me especially excited for the sequel.... that never came.
I understand why they did it, but there's just too much to absorb. I was a fan, and although I recognized some of the names, I wasn't familiar with any of the characters besides Gul'dan.
The entire first movie should have been a 5-10 minute exposition. "It's been X years since we came through the portal..." And instead we follow Thrall and Grom, and Uther while two factions battle for dominance! (and it's been a while, so I forget what all happens in Warcraft 2)
Now that I've typed it all out, I've decided that if they could only make one Warcraft movie, but I got to pick which era, it would definitely be Arthas and the Lich King. That's a good story.
I never played wow and thought the movie was pretty good. Especially for a video game adaptation
Kung pow! They even had a silly thing after the credits that i thought was real but it never came to fruition =(
updates have been coming out all the way up to 2022, so who knows?
I'd also love to see this sequel.
It's one of the projects I check every year or so, kung pow still makes me laugh.
As a fan of genuine hong kong kung fu cinema growing up, this remains one of the few films I had to stop watching about 15 minutes in—was clear whoever made the movie had never actually seen a kung fu film. To add insult to injury the dvd decided to hide itself under a pile of magazines causing me and my brother to pay extra on a massive late fee because of it. I hate that movie.
Wow that's the worst reason to hate a movie i have ever seen. "as a fan of star wars, it was clear that the makers of spaceballs have no idea how to make a scifi movie."
It was completely devoid of humor, and was clearly written by someone who had never actually watched the thing they were satirizing. I feel like that’s a pretty good reason to not like it.
There are a million genuine articles of badly dubbed, stupid and hilariously cheap kung fu movies out there, Kung Pow was like if Coke decided to make an off-brand Mr. Pibb.
It's a bit odd to claim the guy who reedited and remixed an entire existing kung fu film never watched a kung fu film. Like his work or not, he pretty evidently saw the thing.
Jumper. It was setting up an interesting world with more depth than the first movie could delve. I loved that one of the characters was so cool that the author of the original novel went out and wrote another book just about the movie's character and it rocked.
The novel Jumper by Steven Gould, on which the film Jumper was based, spawned a continuing series that went on for a while and kept being pretty good. For the hell of it the author also wrote Jumper: Griffin's Story which wasn't part of his novels' continuity, instead it was a prequel to the movie.
Freaking loved big trouble in little China. Cult classic to the max. I thought the magic was so cool!
There is a book, but it wasn't very good. :(
1st book adapts the movie:
Big Trouble in Little China
The problem was the story itself was so self-contained any sequel they tried would have clearly been nothing but a huge cash grab.
But they supposedly are making a sequel, starring The Rock 🫤
One of my favorites, the the series was excellent too. I’m not entirely sure which actor I liked best in the role
He had some great animated movies. Unlike the movie with the worst casting decision in the history of comic book movies.
I mean, if we're talking release order, then Return of the Jedi did get a sequel! It was called The Phantom Menace and ahh
Ahahaha hahahahahahahaha. I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I almost made it through with a straight face.
Amazed no one else has mentioned The Fifth Element. It was planned at one point I think but got cancelled.
The fifth element is a perfect self contained story. I’m not sure how you could up the stakes for a sequel. You could tell other stories in that world maybe, but I don’t think a sequel featuring the original characters would be good.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was something of a spiritual sequel by the same filmmaker, but it turned out to be an unentertaining bag of cinematic butt.
I found it to be rather entertaining, I liked the action, I liked the design and I liked some of the charactets. Unfortunately both the main characters and the plot seemed rather underdeveloped to me, so it kind of did turn out to be a bag of cinematic butt.
The leads were supposed to be flirty and romantic, but they came off as siblings. Any romance felt weird.
Yes, they did come off as siblings! It would be so much better if they were just friends. The sibling chemistry was there. I also found it strange that in the end the leading guy was supposed to finally stop playing it by the book, but he never really did during the whole film. That was a whole missing arch. And the bad guys were sleeping most of the time.
Oh my goodness. I loved The Fifth Element! I strongly believe that it's a great example of movie pacing.
Crimson Skies and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow have somewhat-similar settings, if you're jonesing for Sky Captain dieselpunk American alt-history interwar air-carrier content and are not aware of it. Was just talking about Crimson Skies with someone on here the other day.
Funny story. I happen to have a bunch of Crimson Skies toys sitting in a box, all unopened. There was a comic shop near my job and they had a clear-out table that sold unpopular items at a steep discount. I got a bunch of T-shirts and other stuff, and liked the Crimson Skies stuff. For a buck each, why not?
I'll answer a slightly different question -- what film I would have liked to have had a sequel for that didn't. I don't know enough about the factors that go into deciding to fund sequels of movies.
I'd like to have had a sequel for Tora Tora Tora! doing Midway.
Tora Tora Tora! covers the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is, also in my opinion, one of the best war films out there. A lot of war films fall into a "rah rah rah good guys versus bad guys" thing; Tora Tora Tora! had both Japanese and American teams working on it and was designed for release in both countries, and was, I would say, impressively-objective. It was pretty light on actual action shots, which I think was probably reasonable -- the really critical factors were decisions made in the runup to the event, rather than the specific actions of any one person on-scene. I believe that it did do a good job of highlighting the significant factors leading to the outcome.
Looking at IMDB, a number of people seemed to feel that Tora Tora Tora! was boring. It had a lot of people talking, and not a lot of actual combat shots (and those were not high-budget, not where the money really went).
The 1976 Midway was not good.
The 2019 Midway was better, but the things that it was good at tended to be the kinds of things that Hollywood conventionally does well -- high production values, pretty lighting, lots of action shots, people being tough, etc. I was kind of irritated by the amount of coverage that John Ford got -- I appreciate that he was one of Hollywood's own, and he was in the middle of things, but he was really not very significant in the grand scheme of things. Contrast that with, say, Henry Harrison in Gettysburg, the actor who was working for the Confederate States of America, where the people making the movie enjoyed repeatedly pointing out that Harrison was an actor...but at least there, Harrison really did have a meaningful role in the battle.
It also was awfully light on a few important bits that arguably didn't reflect very well on the US. Tora Tora Tora! talks about material that was covered in analysis on what went wrong, so it doesn't shy away from that. Midway tends to gloss over some bits. It does cover some, like McClusky's error in target selection that almost caused Enterprise's strike to leave Akagi undamaged.
However, a more-serious set of issues weren't. Maybe the most-serious -- in the actual battle, one of the most-critical issues was that a significant part of the three carriers' flight groups headed off into nowhere. Partway through the flight, one of the torpedo bomber squadron commanders, Waldron, disagreed with the flight's commander, Ring, told Ring that he was flying to the wrong place, openly mutinied and ordered his squadron to disregard Ring and fly to where he thought the Japanese carriers were. This was in a strike where working together between different types of aircraft was absolutely critical and the entire operational Pacific American carrier force was at stake. That is court-martial material, and probably the only reason it didn't happen was because (a) Waldron was absolutely right, and had flown directly to the Japanese carriers, attacking without support, whereas Ring flew the rest of the planes off into nowhere and had some ditch on the way back, and (b) Waldron was killed along with all but one of his squadron when he conducted his attack solo. But then there's the question of why Ring was flying off into the middle of nowhere. I think that modern historians -- think John Parshall or the US Naval Institute -- present an extremely unflattering
picture of Mitscher, one of the carrier commanders, who likely disregarded his own actual orders from his carrier force commander, Spruance, and sent his own forces off into the middle of nowhere due to disagreeing with him. Further, it's likely that Mitscher concealed information on the situation -- a situation for which he was likely in large part responsible -- from being sent back up to higher command. While Mitscher did ultimately redeem himself, did well later in the war, this could easily have been a career-ending move, and because of that move, the battle ultimately was much more on a knife edge than it needed to be.
Its focus on the action rather than the leadup to the battles and the decisions that caused various events to happen the way they do is why it can get through four entire battles -- the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subsequent American raid on the Marshalls, the Doolittle Raid, and the Battle of Midway -- in a single movie. There's enough time to cover four battles in one movie if you're heavily-weighting action shots, but you can only do that if you throw out most of the decision-making leading to those battles.
It did spend some time covering the intelligence side of Midway, which was significant, but that was only really one input into the calls that were made, and only for one of the four battles.
It's not that I don't feel that there's a place for that sort of action-oriented movie, but there are also lots of them, but very few war movies like Tora Tora Tora!
That is an epic answer. And you've convinced me I need to watch Tora Tora Tora! again because the last time I watched it I was probably under 10 and had no appreciation for it, particularly on network television cut with commercials.
I had never heard any of this before.
I was always under the impression that Midway was in the bag thanks to the Americans breaking the Japanese codes.
Never heard the name Waldron before.
You are correct; it would be a great movie.
I was always under the impression that Midway was in the bag thanks to the Americans breaking the Japanese codes.
So, this is getting outside the movie itself, but...
That gave the US a major advantage relative to where they would have otherwise been -- they otherwise would have probably had at most just two carriers instead of three, and an unprepared island garrison versus the four Japanese carriers (and large follow-up surface fleet that was coming behind). Japan's intention was to force a lopsided battle with the American carriers. Japan had a picket line of submarines that would have had a shot at the US's carriers if they sortied from Hawaii; because the Americans moved early, the carriers were already past the submarines by the time that they were in place.
But it was by no means in the bag simply because of the intelligence. That intelligence was probably necessary for the US to have done what it did at the Battle of Midway, but not alone sufficient. The Japanese and American carrier air wings, even with the US doing emergency patch-up to get an extra carrier into the fight, were close in size. Midway's garrison absorbed the initial Japanese air attack, but even with the US putting every aircraft it could on the island, the land-based air arm didn't do much to the Japanese fleet (though a bomb or two from a land-based aircraft falling differently could also have significantly affected the outcome; Lady Luck played her role on both sides). The Japanese fleet did detect the American carriers and had been on the verge of launching a strike against them, and were only boxed out by minutes. That boxing out only happened because of an extraordinary series of lucky events for the US -- various groups of American aircraft showing up at the right times to prevent Japan from launching strikes; the USS Nautilus being held down by the Japanese destroyer Arashi; McClusky leading USS Enterprise's strike group -- which did a huge amount of the damage and was going to miss the Japanese fleet -- seeing Arashi and deciding to fly ahead of its path in the hopes that it was heading for the Japanese carriers; and Yorktown's and Enterprise's dive bomber groups actually hitting with their weapons after poor earlier performance from some other -- often much-less-experienced -- air groups. Normally, the weapon one would want to use against a carrier or other large ships were torpeoes; the American torpedo bombers generally weren't able to land hits and at that point in the war, American torpedoes had a number of technical problems. The Japanese pilots in the fleet in the early war were generally much-better trained than the American pilots, and had performed significantly better; had the Japanese managed to get that strike off, the American carriers would have been in trouble.
One reason that the Battle of Midway makes for a cinema-friendly movie is because events that happened in a short period of time did a great deal to drastically determine the battle's outcome. It could very easily have been a lopsided battle in the other direction.
A better statement is that, with what we know today, the US probably more-or-less had the war in the bag, albeit not that battle. It's difficult to see how Japan could have won the war; their war plan, Kantai Kessen, was gambling on one great Japanese naval victory over the US, a resultant collapse in American public support for the war, and for the US to give up when it realistically had a great deal of ability to continue a war and strong long-term advantage. In general, I think that planners in most countries drastically-underestimated the willingness of publics in various countries to continue and sustain a war effort. My own guess -- and I want to be clear here that I am not echoing any expert analysis that I have read -- is that this had a lot to do with war planners in a number of countries focusing on Russia's collapse in World War I (and in Japan's case, Russia's loss in the Russo-Japanese War; their actions looked in many ways similar to attempting a repeat of their attack on Russia there) and believing that it could be extrapolated to other countries and other times. The right lesson, I think, was probably that Imperial Russia had a lot of very serious political problems around the time of those wars, not that it was particularly easy to defeat major powers.
As for the Battle of Midway itself, the best sources in terms of understanding the battle are probably in text form, but if one wants to watch a pretty good -- in my opinion -- documentary-style set of videos, I'd recommend Montemayor's series of three YouTube videos on Midway. They don't have fantastic production values, have the occasional capitalization error, but the history is solid, and they do a good job of talking about most of the actual factors that determined the battle. And they keep maps visible, so one can see what's happening.
The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)
The Battle of Midway: Hiryu's Counterstrike (2/3)
The Battle of Midway: The American Perspective and The Strategic Consequences of the Battle (3/3)
Montemayor also doesn't talk about Mitscher, though it's also not as if he actively avoids that; he does cover American organizational problems effectively in his video on the Battle of Savo Island: "Battle of Savo Island 1942: America's Worst Naval Defeat".
First, you are a very good writer. I usually roll my eyes at a wall of text like that but you convey the ideas clearly.
Second, I am again surprised by how close it was.
Finalyy, I will share some resources you might enjoy.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/dark-voyage-alan-furst/11713695?ean=9780812967968
I like all of Allan Furst's WW2 novels, but this is the most nautical. Dutch freighter captain is recruited into the British service. War book, sea tale, spy story all rolled into one.
Connections is an old BBC history series I stumbled upon a while back. The presenter shows how so many things interconnect to form the future.
https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ?list=PL5HjoPOFFC56enV6cW1zqRvXyY6pNm8cq
Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson. I suggest this book to anyone who likes to get lost in a novel.
The grandfather is a WW2 codebreaker tasked with keeping the Nazis from finding out that the Allies were reading their mail. His grandson is trying to set up an online bank in 1990's Manila.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/cryptonomicon-neal-stephenson/7899276?ean=9780380788620
Again, thanks for the informative message
It must take great effort to write all that so well and link sources and provide recommendations for greater understanding. Please know it is deeply appreciated. My grandpa was in the Pacific theater and I find it fascinating.